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Good morning! It will be another glorious spring day in Albany. Gov. Andrew Cuomo will be in New York City with no announced schedule; Lt. Gov. Bob Duffy will be in Buffalo to kick off a project at the terminus of the Erie Canal. Legislators are scattered. Assemblyman Jim Tedisco and Sen. Kathy Marchione will hold a press conference calling for an end to horse slaughter. This evening, Sen. Neil Breslin will headline a forum at Union College supporting public campaign finance. Here are this morning’s headlines…

John Faso: The instant reaction of self-styled reformers is to promote public financing of elections. We should see that for what it really is: an effort to promote an ideological agenda having little or nothing to do with current or past scandals. Using taxpayer dollars to fund political campaigns — with a $6 match for each dollar raised — is not an answer to corruption. (NYP)

The Times Union: Rather than create a needlessly complicated bureaucracy — a legal entity answerable to the governor inside an elections agency run by a board that is independent of the governor — the smarter answer is to put oversight of election law under the state’s top lawyer. The person ultimately responsible for enforcement of election law then would be directly answerable to voters rather than to the governor. (TU)

State lawmakers are now jokingly patting each other down, a bit of dark humor as a nod to Assemblyman Nelson Castro’s reported decision to wear a wire for prosecutors. (NYT)

Gabrielle Giffords:SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.//On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count. (NYT)

About Capitol Confidential

Capitol Confidential gathers the best coverage of New York politics and puts it all together. Each section - Capitol, The State Worker, New York on the Potomac, and Voices - represents a unique facet of the political scene. The Capitol section features coverage from the Times Union Capitol bureau. The State Worker is dedicated to state worker issues. New York on the Potomac offers news of interest to New Yorkers from Washington. And Voices features the best of everything else, pointing you to columnists and bloggers from across the Web.